In organizing and advocacy work, strength comes in numbers. Identifying and mobilizing your community around a certain issue or action will be far more likely to yield results rather than solely relying on your organization’s staff. In order to build power and strength through numbers, you must identify your base of supporters (the group of people you can rely on when there are local actions or projects) and grow this base by identifying a target audience (a specific group of people with shared interests that are most likely to be interested in your advocacy).
Roles and Responsibilities
There are a few key roles that any organizing effort will need to fill in order to function in the highest possible capacity. These roles may have different names in different organizations, and each role may have a slightly different set of associated responsibilities, but the guidance below should be used to help build a general plan to structure how your staff and parent/community members contribute to your work.
- Field Organizer: These members of the organization carry out a lot of the work that may not always seem important or meaningful in the moment, but is in fact critical to the success of any organizing effort. The specific duties associated with this work will change depending on the organization or specific effort, but may include recruiting new members or volunteers, planning events, and otherwise implementing the organization's community outreach plans.
- Group Builder: These members tend to stand out as individuals who can bring people together and provide some direction to other members in the organization. Group Builders are often responsible for helping Field Organizers be more effective, providing support and guidance related to things like recruitment and outreach, as well as managing logistics so that Field Organizers can focus on relationship building and field work. The scope of their work will change depending on a variety of factors unique to each organization and/or effort.
- Advocate/Influencer: These members can speak for the organization and are effective in communicating the value and importance of the work to people who may not otherwise be familiar. Influencers advocate for their organizations and spread the word in a way that drives interest and engagement with new audiences. They may also take on internal operational tasks, but much of the work associated with this type of member is external facing.
- Recruiter: These members have the important task of bringing new members into the organization. They must have a deep knowledge of the organization's structure, its volunteer resource needs, and its vision for growth. Recruiters must also have a clear sense of what skills and experiences are important for new members to have, and should be able to find and network with groups and individuals who would make good prospective members.
- Messenger/Communicator: These members can support in crafting and delivering your organization's message to external stakeholders. Where the Influencers elevate your organization among their community and those directly affected by the issue at hand, Messenger/Communicators can be called upon to provide the right information about your work to a wider range of audiences, potentially including funders and/or media.
The individuals playing these roles will all have a different relationship with your work and will likely engage with Murmuration and Organizer in different ways. Depending on the nature of your organization's structure and organizing efforts, you will need to think through how these different roles and responsibilities will be reflected in Organizer. You will also need to determine which type of member will have access to the different functionality and data within the tool (e.g., will Group Builders have Manager account access versus Volunteer account access?).
You will also need to determine which individuals within your organization should be responsible for training and supporting each type of member. You may need to have staff dedicated to managing the people who are designated as recruiters, or you could identify who within that group can take on a leadership and support role that manages the work that others are responsible for.
Identifying Your Base
- What is the issue you want to solve?
- Who is most likely to be impacted by this issue?
- Get a picture in your head of the “type” of person you want to support or persuade. This can be broad (i.e. unregistered voters in New York County) or narrow (people of color in Kings County who voted in the 2020 election but not the 2022 election and are likely to support charter schools.)
- What membership logs/contacts do you already have? Who in this group would support your work? What past activity data can you look at to identify supporters?
- Create a table like the one below, identify the fields in Organizer that you can use to narrow down your universe and identify your target audience or potential supporters.
- Refer to the Organizer Data Dictionary to find all attributes, their definitions, and the selection criteria for them.
| Attribute Category | Attribute | Selected Criteria | Excluded Criteria | How will segmenting on this attribute help to identify your target audience? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Civic | Vote History | Voted Yes in 2022 New York General Election | Voted Yes in 2022 New York General | To identify voters who are likely to come out for a presidential election but not a midterm election |
Use the community builder tool to identify potential supporters/target audiences. Use the attributes listed in the Data Dictionary to curate these lists based on the data available in the tool. For detailed instructions on how to build communities in Organizer based on the criteria identified above see the Help Center articles on Creating a Community.
Resources
View the Organizing and Advocacy Playbook as a PDF
Background Information
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Learning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Planning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Implementation
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Execution
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Reflection